Thursday, August 14, 2014

Don't do stupid stuff, Uncle Sam -- Aug. 14, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Maybe, as Hillary Clinton said, “Don’t do stupid stuff” isn’t
a proper organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy. But it surely would be a
welcome change here at home.

If only President Obama could order the federal government to
stop doing stupid stuff on the home front, he might begin to rebuild people’s rock-bottom
trust in government. Here’s a modest start: make sure federal workers pay their
taxes.

It seems obvious to the point of absurdity that federal employees
should pay what they owe or have their wages garnished, but it doesn’t always
work that way.

For example, about 83,000 Pentagon employees and contractors
who held or were eligible for security clearances owed $730 million in taxes in
2012, the Government Accountability Office reported last month. The median
amount owed was $2,700, but people owed from $100 to millions of dollars. Most of
the tax delinquents had no plan to repay their tax debt.

The report found that about 26,000 employees and contractors
had access to classified information at the same time they owed federal taxes
totaling $229 million, and about 6,200 of those had top-secret clearance.

In other words, we are risking sensitive secrets to people
who are vulnerable to financial pressure. As the report said, someone who is
“financially overextended is at risk of having to engage in illegal acts to
generate funds.”

The personal finances and tax situations of applicants for security
clearances are supposedly considered, but federal law does not expressly prohibit
someone with unpaid tax debt from receiving clearance. Records don’t indicate
how often clearance is denied because of unpaid taxes.

Naturally, the GAO’s report prompted outrage on Capitol
Hill.

“Federal tax cheats with security clearances jeopardize both
our national and economic security, and could unnecessarily put our nation’s
classified information at risk,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in a statement.
Coburn has been talking about cracking down on federal workers who don’t pay
their taxes for years. In the House, a bill
to fire federal workers with unpaid tax bills failed last year.

But the problem doesn’t exist just at the Pentagon.

Congress could start by cleaning up Capitol Hill. About 3.24
percent of Senate workers and 4.87 percent of House workers owed $8.6 million
in taxes as of last Sept. 30, according to IRS data released in May under a
Freedom of Information Act request by USA Today. That’s 714 tax delinquents on
Capitol Hill. The IRS didn’t say whether any members of Congress were
delinquent.

At the White House, 36 of nearly 1,800 workers owe on their
taxes for a tax delinquency rate of 2 percent.

In all, more than 318,000 federal workers and retirees owed
$3.3 billion in back taxes, USA Today reported. That’s slightly more than 3
percent.

To be fair, the proportion of tax delinquents is far higher
among people not working in government than among those who do. The IRS
estimates that 8.7 percent of taxpayers overall owe tax bills.

Still, it’s maddening that federal workers are skipping out
on their taxes. Not even all IRS workers
pay their fair share. About 1.2 percent of IRS employees are tax scofflaws.

Even worse, some of the tax delinquents at IRS got bonuses. IRS
awarded more than 1,100 employees more than $1 million in cash, 10,000 hours
off and 69 step increases or promotions within a year that their tax compliance
problems were substantiated, according to a report last March by the Treasury inspector
general for tax administration.

For its part, IRS responded that it had examined the
policies of 15 federal agencies and 13 states and found that only one agency
had a rule against granting a bonus in cases of misconduct.

It’s no wonder Americans’ trust in government has sunk to a record
low. Only 13 percent of people say government in
Washington can be trusted to do what’s right all or most of the time, a new
CNN-IRC International Poll found. About three in four say they trust government
only some of the time, and one in 10 say they never trust Washington.

Lack of trust maybe epidemic but it needn’t be inevitable. A
first step to restoring people’s confidence is to ensuring that federal
employees pay their taxes. Government
doesn’t have to do stupid stuff.